week 6 personal contributions

Finishing my sixth week with Virginia Housing Alliance I am able to look back and acknowledge my personal contributions to the alliance that has had a significant impact. I have been able to work on a wide variety of tasks and projects, some more significant than others, but nonetheless I feel as if my work and opinion have been valued and effective. Since about my first or second week I have been working on collecting and compiling information from each of Virginia’s eleven congressional districts to form a thorough fact sheet for the Virginia Housing Alliance to distribute to the public and partner organizations. I have been scouring other fact sources, state data, and information from the national census database. This is a project I have been working on for a long time now and I just recently finished it and has been sent to a graphic designer. I feel as if this has been one of my largest contributions to Virginia Housing Alliance and it will serve as a fact database for future talking points and for distribution (to constituents and state representatives). I am most particularly proud of this project and the work I have done to complete it because at first, I was very lost but as I continued working on this project it became more rewarding and I am looking forward to seeing the final copy from the graphic designer. 

A lot of my other work with the Virginia Housing Alliance is related to the American Relief Package that is being distributed to each state. In order to properly advocate for affordable housing we need to have an understanding of funding, whether that be how much is accessible, needed, or what is an appropriate ask. In order to better gauge this understanding, I have been researching other budget proposals in various other states. By researching other advocacy asks, governor’s budgets, and policy proposals I have been able to share my research with executive director Biran Koziol and senior policy analyst Molly Jacobson. We take this information and then make suggestions and estimates of how much money from the budget we would like to spend on better affordable housing opportunities in Virginia. The primary research I do on other states is extremely significant to their overall asks and recommendations to state-level actors.